The Metal Gear of Haruhi Suzumiya
by LatwPIAT
Summary: Disappointed that the school winter sports trip goes to a fake indoor ski centre, Haruhi loudly voices her complains to Kyon on the bus, and before he knows it, the SOS Brigade find themselves on the Fox archipelago in Alaska, near a military base named 'Shadow Moses'.


It was a cold winter day, and like most days I take time out of my busy schedule to reflect upon, it started with the innocent yet prophetic voice of Haruhi Suzumiya making ambiguously ominous statements like the secretly evil villain in a spy flick.

Well, truth to be told, the day started somewhere around midnight, when I was sound asleep and freed from the stress of studying. And it was my sister, not Haruhi, who woke me by pushing roughly against my sheets. I guess I should count myself lucky; the prospect of Haruhi sneaking into my room just to involve me in yet another of her bizarre plans is about as chilling as the brisk winds.

"Wake up big brother!" my sister said "Mommy told me to wake you up, or you're going to be late for your class trip!"

Begrudgingly, I managed to pull myself out of my bed and get through my morning routine. As I quickly ate my breakfast, white snowflakes fell lazily to the ground, making me dread the walk to my school even more.

It was at school – or rather, outside the school – that Haruhi's words filled me with dread. She, wearing a big and thick coat, turned to me and said.

"There are you are! You should turn up earlier, you know. I expect my SOS brigade members to turn up on time to school events. The SOS brigade must always make a good impression!"

I was more than five minutes early! And besides, those words did not terrify me. Instead the words that came next did.

"Kyon, isn't it weird that we go to a fake mountain for the school ski-trip? Mountains shouldn't be indoors, they should be outdoors like they were intended to!"

I doubt the tectonic plates have much on their minds when they collide. But what I really dread is when Haruhi's mouth forms an upside down V in disappointment over something not being like she expects or wants. When the world doesn't quite fit Haruhi's whims, the world seems to act like a syncopate to her wishes, and somehow I always end up having to talk Haruhi out of whatever she has got her mind set upon like the jaws of a badger.

Like now, I would have expected the fake mountain inside the indoor ski hall to have been replaced with a life-size replica of Mt. Olympus. But, to my delight, I just that moment spotted the short shape of Yuki Nagato, and she did not seem to have been alerted by recent changes in the cosmic geography. Instead, her eyes were glued to the pages of a hardcover book with a western title. She could probably have made the pages immune to the effects of the snow, but instead she kept the pages dry with an umbrella with a bland design.

It was as if Haruhi had read my thoughts when she spun around and told Nagato that her umbrella had a very bland design. Instead, Haruhi declared, she should have an umbrella with a cat design on it or something like that. It seemed that the weekend had starved Haruhi of an opportunity to torment people with costumes, and now she was taking it out on the first SOS-brigade member she could find.

Though I suppose I was actually the first SOS-Brigade member Haruhi could find, but I didn't want to remind her of that – I still haven't forgotten the humiliation I was forced to go through last Christmas.

Sadly, just then the teachers told us to start boarding the busses, and I did not have a chance to catch a glimpse of Mikuru Asahina in whatever lovely article of outerwear she'd decided to cover herself up in for the day. The teachers had cruelly decided to spilt the busses by year-group, and Asahina, who was one year my senior, would not be within arms' reach for several hours yet.

The bus ride was, as I had expected, rather boring. It was too warm, so I had taken off my jacket, only to find that the air condition seemed to be locked at 'gale'. I tried to convince Haruhi to trade places with me, but she refused to give up the window position.

"If we're going to a fake mountain for the winter sports day," she explained "then I'm going to get as much view of the real snow as I can."

Liar. You haven't given the snow more than a few sullen glances for the last hour.

Haruhi broke into another tirade about how it wasn't a real winter sports day when we just went to an indoor mountain that was always covered in snow all year round, and I distracted myself by glancing at Nagato's book. It was a book in some Latin language about a French philosopher.

Then, suddenly, her gaze shot up and fixed mine. Her eyes widened in a manner I have come to dread as much as Perseus dreaded the gaze of the gorgon.

"The local terrain is undergoing an explosion in reverse information entropy degradation which has caused the projected inner space of the local four-vectors to not map to a spherical spacetime," she said, as if that was supposed to make sense.

I looked at her and tried to make her understand that I couldn't understand any of that without alerting Haruhi to the fact that I'd stopped listening to her rant.

"An event unwarranted by the stochastic wave functions governing matter has changed our location with respect to space without a corresponding change in time."

Nagato, that's not an explanation, not matter what you think.

I didn't have time to decipher the enigmatic alien interface's loquacious statements, because just as she was finished, out bus came to an abrupt halt. I saw Okabe lean forwards to the bus driver and say something, and then he picked up the microphone to the PA system.

"Uh," Okabe said, just as eloquent today as the day he introduced himself as my homeroom teacher, "we seem to have taken a wrong turn at an intersection, so we've stopped at a small way station. The other teachers and I have decided to move the lunch break to now so you can get an opportunity to stretch your legs and eat. Please stay either near the busses or in the roadside restaurant. We apologize very much for the change in schedule."

"Finally!" Haruhi said "I was getting tired of sitting down so much. They really shouldn't make us sit so much on the winter sports day. It goes against the entire purpose of a sports day."

So they should just have a snowy mountain next to our school. I got that the first time, Haruhi, you don't need to tell me again.

"Where are we really?" I asked Nagato as Haruhi dragged us – mostly me, with Nagato following by her own accord – off the bus

"We are Fifty-four degrees, fourty-six minutes and six seconds north of the equator and one-hundred-and-sixty-four degrees, eleven minutes, and twelve seconds west of Greenwich," she answered.

I sighed, but I dare not ask her to clarify, lest the no-longer-myopic alien tell me that she meant 'on Earth, in the Solar System which is in the Orion arm of the Milky Way galaxy'.

She looked up at me with eyes that were somehow colder than the surrounding arctic landscape.

"This area is also known as 'Unimak', one of the Aleutian islands in Alaska."

Alaska? But Alaska is not even connected to Japan by ice during the winter. How could we have ended up on a volcanic island chain when driving by bus? If I was the kind of person to get headaches from complicated situations, I might have just come down with a particularly harsh migraine just now.

I hadn't noticed Haruhi leave, but she returned from another of the buses with Asahina and Koizumi in tow. At least, with Asahina here, I might have something to take my mind off the craziness of the situation. I might have gone mad had it not been for Asahina and her new winter coat, which fit her in just the right way, and her cheeks which were lit up in a rosy red from the cold. In spite of the harsh, arctic weather, I felt like I could melt.

Koizumi raised the issue of going inside the restaurant to buy something to eat, or to eat our packed lunches, and for once I found myself agreeing with his suggestion. If Haruhi had dragged us all the way to Alaska, I would have nothing to do with whatever her subconsciousness had concocted. I would much rather that we simply all returned home and had normal SOS club meetings or something like that. I certainly could use some of Asahina's tea right now.

"Wait, what's that in the distance?" Haruhi asked. I should have learned not to tempt fate like that by now. I seem to have gotten Nemesis herself as my nemesis.

"Yuki, you're farsighted, right? Can you tell me what it is?"

Haruhi, it doesn't work like that. Even if Nagato really was farsighted, she'd still have to take out her contact lenses to have any use of it.

"It is a chain-link fence. There is a sign on the fence."

Read the sign. No, wait, I don't want her to do that!

"What does it say?" Haruhi asked with too much enthusiasm for my comfort.

Haruhi, that fence must be a good several hundred meters away, it's still dark, and we're in the middle of a snowstorm.

"'Shadow Moses – US Army – No trespassing.'" Nagato read aloud in her whisper-like voice. You know Nagato, if you keep that up, Haruhi is bound to start suspecting things…

"Oh cool!" Haruhi shouted. What little hope I have left for the world I used to wish she was just talking about the weather. "An abandoned military base. We should have look and see if there are any secret superweapons or supersoldier experiments left behind there! This is the duty of the SOS brigade!"

Are you even listening to yourself? Even if the military had been so stupid as to leave their secret superweapons or supersoldier projects behind, it would still be dangerous to investigate them!

"If we're going to search an entire base by ourselves…"

By which you mean everyone but yourself.

"…we're going to have to split up. We can call each other over our cellphones when we find something," she continued.

Shouldn't that be 'if' and not 'when'?

"But we're going to need codenames!" Haruhi said triumphantly, as if she'd just uncovered the Moscow Five all by herself. She let a finger pan over us.

"Asahina, you'll be Cute Cat, Koizumi, you can be Smug Snake, Yuki will be Quiet Bookworm, and Kyon can be Stubborn Mule."

Hey! That's not fair!

"...and I'll be Awesome Haruhi."

That's not an animal. Nor, for that matter, a codename.

"Humans are also an animal, so therefore a Haruhi is also an animal." Haruhi explained.

There is so much wrong with that statement I don't even know where to begin.

"We can put each other on speed dial to call each other quickly if we find something," Koizumi suggested.

"Excellent idea, Smug Snake!" Haruhi smiled. "That's my new order. We'll put all the numbers we need to call on speed dial."

_I want a save point_, I thought to myself, as Haruhi's scrutinizing eyes watched me add the rest of the SOS brigade to speed dial on my old cellphone.


End file.
